


staying alive, like sarin gas in the headlines

by Dragunov



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 17:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1135294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magnussen knows that Mycroft tortured Moriarty at the same time he knows that the torture would never work, and having tried it, Mycroft knows that Magnussen has nothing: there are no pressure points. They are at a stuffy club luncheon, where they do not shake hands, but they stand together, shoulders bowed slightly side by side like a study in friendly body language, which the politicians love. They are putting on a show. "After all," Magnussen says, "How do you scare a man who has seen the end of the world?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	staying alive, like sarin gas in the headlines

He is the biggest story Magnussen has to tell, and so Magnussen knows better than to even try.

Charles Augustus Magnussen is a person, and they will write biographies about him, in the future, after he is dead.

Even those biographies published decades later will only say what he wants them to say. But all of it will be fact, more or less. Charles Augustus Magnussen has kissed the Prime Minister’s wife on the cheek, on camera, breath minty cold and lips hovering politely, a photo printed in harmless black and white, as if it had happened ages ago, so as to not matter anymore, and when he is dead it will be reprinted and reprinted, solid proof that he once was and that he no longer is, and if his kiss was ever terrifying, if he ever squeezed her hand so hard she looked to her husband with fear in her smile, and she couldn’t do anything, and her husband couldn’t do anything - if that ever happened, it will fade away, become nothing but academic footnote.

James Moriarty, on the other hand, is a fairy tale; and everything they say about him, after he is dead, will be fiction, and everything they say about him will come from their own living, fast beating hearts; will come from the way they look behind them on their walk home, at night, when they are convinced they are being followed but see no one there; will come from the way they are still afraid of the space between floor and bed, and always will be, even though though they’ve not believed in the bogieman since they were - as Moriarty himself might say, in cloying mix of accents, “wee” - and therefore everything they say will necessarily be truer than fact, and far more terrifying.

Jim Moriarty is in Magnussen’s mind palace, too. That is the point. 

There is nowhere he is not.

Magnussen is a merchant of fear, and Jim Moriarty is threat inflation.

"Do you remember," Jim Moriarty says, as if he is asking Magnussen for the answer key to next week’s crossword puzzle; he is holding a file Magnussen can not quite see; holding it upside down so that everything falls out. A photo drifts by Magnussen’s feet and he bends to pick it up; piles and piles of sheep corpses. From time to time Jim doodles in the files. Dicks, mostly. Missiles. The Washington Monument. He has penciled on the back of this photo _Banjawarn/Syria/The Holocaust/What does it fucking matter???/Merry Christmas Charlie._

"What do I remember?"

Jim Moriarty shrugs.

"He is working for Mycroft again," Magnussen says, meaningfully.

"Who?" Moriarty asks, and smiles. He is swaying his head and his hands, slow sweeps with quick little movements, like a conductor writhing before an empty orchestra. Suddenly he stops and he stares, as if he is not quite sure what he is doing here. Magnussen has a file on him. It is a slim, beige affair, and he stores it between Fidel Castro and the Dynamics of Combustion; because Magnussen knows the Banjawarn nuclear explosion was him, Jim Moriarty, eighteen years old and boyish not careful, not yet, Banjawarn is his moment of youthful exuberance, the best years of his life, nothing else will ever be the same, and he is wearing tattered coveralls like one day he’ll wear designer suits. He still speaks with his hometown accent, for the most part, he says, all splendid spiteful Belfast, "Now, am I the destroyer of the worlds?"

Jim Moriarty sets off a nuclear explosion in the Australian outback, and it registers around the world as a mysterious seismic disturbance; Mycroft knows it; Magnussen knows it; and Moriarty spends the rest of his life proving again and again what he already knows. That if he wants, he can set this world aflame. The dynamics of combustion, the motive power of fire, the heat death of the universe. (“That is the difference between us, Mr Moriarty,” Magnussen says, once, in the only unwise moment he thought he might press Jim’s pressure points, “I know better than to tell my biggest story first.”) Moriarty presses his lips to the point over Magnussen’s throat where his heart beats, and then snorts, as if he is unimpressed; touching Moriarty is like touching a snake for the first time. Where one expects to feel slime, they find a terrible dry coarseness that threatens to shed off and become a different terrible, dry coarseness. That is why the file is so thin.

He is humming _Charlie is My Darling_. My darling, my darling.

He licks the side of Magnussen’s face, “Did you miss me?” and Magnussen opens his eyes, to the sound of laughter like a broken record.


End file.
